Many applications allow users to apply effects to text within a document. For example, warping, scaling, line effects as well as three dimensional effects may be applied to the text. Typically when these effects are applied to the text, each character within the text is converted to a bitmap and any effects are applied to each individual bitmap without taking into account the surrounding characters. Each of these individual bitmaps are then combined and displayed to show the entire word. The displayed word may have characters that overlap.